Scenario: Bill Faloon
Interview with Bill Faloon by Jonathan Despres. Go to the Interviews. Tell us about yourself. What is your background, and what current projects are you involved in? I am a co-founder of the Life Extension Foundation. In 1980, Saul Kent and I established this non-profit group (www.lef.org) for the purpose of funding anti-aging and anti-death research. With over 120,000 dues paying members, we are the largest life extension organization in the world. My education background is in mortuary science. Back in the early 1970s, cryonics organizations relied on licensed embalmers to perfuse cryo-preservation patients. Several years into my mortuary education, medical personnel became involved in cryonics and most of my surgical skills became obsolete. My focus today is in publishing Life Extension magazine, a 110-page monthly journal that provides our members with state-of-the-art information about preventing disease, slowing aging, and extending the healthy human lifespan. What are your goals for the next decade? It is imperative that individuals, along with public and private organizations dedicate the bulk of their efforts to finding scientific methods to gain total control over human aging. Through Life Extension magazine, I expose flaws in government and industry policies that impede advancements in the life extension sciences. Last year, the Life Extension Foundation funded over $5 million dollars of research to further the death-defying purposes of our organization. My goal over the next decade is My goal over the next decade is to stimulate private and public funding of research in a way that hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent on research aimed at preventing human beings from dying of age-related diseases. Why isn't the science of cryonics progressing at a rate commensurate to other sciences? Actually, it is to an extent, but since we cannot yet reanimate, it is difficult to measure the success. As with aging, we at Life Extension are aggressively funding vitrification research aimed at perfectly preserving the brain. Based on our success with kidney vitrification, we are confident that we may be able to effectively vitrify the brain within the next few years. Which path should we take for immortalism, nanomedicine or biogerontology or? The correct answer is both. Right now, aging humans can help to maintain healthy cellular metabolic rates by taking R-lipoic acid, acetyl-l-carnitine, carnosine and coenzyme Q10. This buys time so that more effective nanomedicine therapies can be developed and then translated to the clinical medical setting where aging humans can access them. What first attracted you to the idea of physical immortality? I am of the absolute belief that humans in the future will not involuntarily die. If I were not convinced of this fact, then I would not be working seven days a week to accomplish this objective. That mankind will someday achieve physical immortality, but that I would perish forever, was never acceptable to me. What can a company do to become successful in the life extension business? There are so many opportunities, that I could write a book about it. For instance, I think there is now enough demand for healthy food that a fast-food restaurant serving disease-preventing/anti-aging food could be a commercial blockbuster (if properly capitalized and managed). I have no time to do this myself, but I would personally appreciate the opportunity to choose a healthy cuisine when stuck at airports, business meetings, etc. How great would an indefinite lifespan be? Beyond anyone’s wildest imagination today. Once a week, I peruse the 300 or so channels on my cable system and wonder how boring it must have been to be a King less than 100 years ago and have to rely on paid live entertainment for a limited time. I personally am bored by 99% of entertainers, but I can usually find a decent historical documentary any time of the day. The pleasures that future generations will experience go beyond any experienced by those alive today. It has already happened in my generation (I was born in 1954), and I only see it accelerating with enhanced technologies. What would advise readers of NanoAging.com do today? I know a number of your supporters are already members of The Life Extension Foundation. For those who have not heard of us, I urge them to log in to www.lef.org to see what we are doing to prevent humans from dying today, while funding research that could lead to indefinitely extended life spans in the future. Category:Interview